The growing presence of Internet and other computer networks such as intranets and extranets has brought about the development of applications in e-commerce, banking-finance, healthcare, manufacturing, telecom and other areas. Organizations increasingly rely on the applications to carry out business, and commit considerable resources for ensuring that the applications perform as expected. To this end, various application management techniques have been developed.
One approach for managing performance, stability, and throughput of application involves monitoring the application, generating data regarding application performance and analyzing the data to determine the application's health. Performance management products analyze a large number of data streams trying to determine a normal and abnormal application state. The large volume of data streams may be difficult to analyze as the performance management products fail to have a semantic understanding of data being analyzed. Accordingly, when an unhealthy application state occurs, many data streams may have abnormal data values because the data streams may be causally related to one another. Since the performance management products lack a semantic understanding of the data, they fail to assist a user in determining either the source or the cause of a problem. Performance management systems fail to know under what conditions a set of data was obtained, making it even more difficult to identify whether there is truly a problem with the application.
The rate of flow of data in computer networks between hosts and clients in internets and intranets depends upon parameters such as throughputs, queue length, resource consumption, database (DB) characteristics. Some of these parameters may be tied to the provision of resources. These provisioned resources may be measured and audit reports may be generated to see if the parameters fall in the range of negotiated service level agreement (SLA). The service level agreement between a service-provider and the user may define the expected and acceptable properties of the services. The SLA provides a tool by which performance goals may be measured by defining performance metrics and corresponding goals. By monitoring compliance with SLA limits, the service provider may avoid unexpected problems that result from disappointing users or hosted customers.